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‘Yeah, well, it seemed a long way off.’
He didn’t look like a fifty-million-dollar man. Tall, rangy frame, brown eyes and hair, casual dresser, hard worker. Excellent architect. ‘Why do you even need to work?’
‘I like to work. I want this project, Evie,’ he said with understated intensity. ‘I don’t want to wait ten years for us to build the resources to take on a project this size. This is the one.’
‘Maybe,’ she said cautiously. ‘But we started this business as equal partners. What happens when you drop ten million dollars into kitty and I put in none?’
‘We treat it as a loan. The money goes in at the beginning of the job, buffers us against the unexpected and comes out again at the end. And we’d need a pre-nup.’
‘Oh, the romance of it all,’ she murmured dryly.
‘So you’ll think about it?’
‘The money or the marriage?’
‘I’ve found that it helps a great deal to think about them together,’ said Max. ‘What are you doing Friday?’
‘I am not marrying you on Friday,’ said Evie.
‘Of course not,’ said Max. ‘We have to wait for the paperwork. I was thinking I could take my fiancée home to Melbourne to meet my mother on Friday. We stay a couple of nights, put on a happy show, return Sunday and get married some time next week. It’s a good solution, Evie. I’ve thought about it a lot.’
‘Yeah, well, I haven’t thought about it at all.’
‘Take all day,’ said Max. ‘Take two.’
Evie just looked at him.
‘Okay, three.’
It took them a week to work through all the ramifications, but eventually Evie said yes. There were provisos, of course. They only went through with the wedding if MEP’s tender for the civic centre was looking good. The marriage would end when Max turned thirty. They’d have to share a house but there would be no sharing of beds. And no sex with anyone else either.
Max had balked at that last stipulation.
Discretion regarding others had been his counter offer. Two years was a long time, he’d argued. She didn’t want him all tense and surly for the next two years, did she?
Evie did not, but the role of betrayed wife held little appeal.
Eventually they had settled on extreme discretion regarding others, with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar penalty clause for the innocent party every time an extramarital affair became public.
‘If I were a cunning woman, I’d employ a handful of women to throw themselves at you to the point where you couldn’t resist,’ said Evie as they headed down to Circular Quay for lunch.
‘If you were that cunning I wouldn’t be marrying you,’ said Max as they stepped from the shadow of a Sydney skyscraper into a sunny summer’s day. ‘What do you want for lunch? Seafood?’
‘Yep. You don’t look like a man who’s about to inherit fifty million dollars, by the way.’
‘How about now?’ Max stopped, lifted his chin, narrowed his eyes and stared at the nearest skyscraper as if he were considering taking ownership of it.
‘It’d help if your work boots weren’t a hundred years old,’ she said gravely.
‘They’re comfortable.’
‘And your watch didn’t come from the two-dollar shop.’
‘It still tells the time. You know, you and my mother are going to get on just fine,’ said Max. ‘That’s a useful quality in a wife.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Dear,’ said Max. ‘If you say so, dear.’
‘Oh, you poor, deluded man.’
Max grinned and stopped mid pavement. He drew Evie to his side, held his phone out at arm’s length and took a picture.
‘Tell me about your family, again,’ she said.
‘Mother. Older brother. Assorted relatives. You’ll be meeting them soon enough.’
She’d be meeting his mother this weekend; it was all arranged. Max showed her the photo he’d just taken. ‘What do you reckon? Tell her now?’
‘Yes.’ They’d had this discussion before. ‘Now would be good.’
Max returned his attention to the phone, texting some kind of message to go with the photo. ‘Done,’ he muttered. ‘Now I feel woozy.’
‘Probably hunger,’ said Evie.
‘Don’t you feel woozy?’
‘Not yet. For that to happen there would need to be champagne.’
So when they got to the restaurant and ordered the seafood platter for lunch, Max also ordered champagne, and they toasted the business, the civic centre project and finally themselves.
‘How come it doesn’t bother you?’ asked Max, when the food was gone and the first bottle of champagne had been replaced by another. ‘Marrying for mercenary reasons?’
‘With my family history?’ she said. ‘It’s perfectly normal.’ Her father was on his fifth wife in as many decades; her mother was on her third husband. She could count the love matches on one finger.
‘Haven’t you ever been in love?’ he asked.
‘Have you?’ Evie countered.
‘Not yet,’ said Max as he signed for the meal, and his answer fitted him well enough. Max went through girlfriends aplenty. Most of them were lovely. None of them lasted longer than a couple of months.
‘I was in love once,’ said Evie as she stood and came to the rapid realisation that she wasn’t wholly sober any more. ‘Best week of my life.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Tall, dark and perfect. He ruined me for all other men.’
‘Bastard.’
‘That too,’ said Evie with a wistful sigh. ‘I was very young. He was very experienced. Worst week of my life.’
‘You said best.’
‘It was both,’ she said with solemn gravity, and then went and spoiled it with a sloppy sucker’s grin. ‘Let’s just call it memorable. Did I mention that he ruined me for all other men?’
‘Yes.’ Max put his hand to her elbow to steady her and steered her towards the stairs and guided her down them, one by one, until they stood on the pavement outside. ‘You’re tipsy.’
‘You’re right.’
‘How about we find a taxi and get you home? I promise to see you inside, pour you a glass of water, find your aspirin and then find my way home. Don’t say I’m not a good fiancé.’
‘Vitamin B,’ said Evie. ‘Find that too.’
Max’s phone beeped and he looked at it and grinned. ‘Logan wants to know if you’re pregnant.’
‘Who’s Logan?’ Even the name was enough to cut through her foggy senses and give her pause. The devil’s name had been Logan too. Logan Black.
‘Logan’s my brother. He’s got a very weird sense of humour.’
‘I hate him already.’
‘I’ll tell him no,’ said Max cheerfully.
Minutes later, Max’s phone beeped again. ‘He says congratulations.’
It couldn’t be her. Logan looked at the image on his phone again, at the photo Max had just sent through. Max looked happy, his wide grin and the smile in his eyes telegraphing a pleasurable moment in time. But it was the face of the bride-to-be that held and kept Logan’s attention. The glossy fall of raven-black hair and the almond-shaped eyes—the tilt of them and the burnt-butter colour. She reminded him of another woman … a woman he’d worked hellishly hard to forget.
It wasn’t the same woman, of course. Max’s fiancée was far more angular of face and her eyes weren’t quite the right shade of brown. Her mouth was more sculpted, less vulnerable … but they were of a type. A little bit fey. A whole lot of beautiful.
Entirely capable of stealing a man’s mind.
Logan hadn’t even known that Max was in a serious relationship, though, with the way Max’s trust was set up and Max’s recent desire to get his hands on it, he should have suspected that matrimony would be his younger half-brother’s next move.
Evie, Max had called her. Pretty name.
The woman he’d known had been called Angie.
Evie. Angie. Evangeline? What were the odds?
Logan studied the photo again, wishing the background weren’t so bright and their faces weren’t quite so shadowed. The woman he’d known as Angie had spent the best part of a week with him. In bed, on their way to bed, in the shower after getting out of bed … She’d been young. Curious. Frighteningly uninhibited. There’d been role play. Bondage play. Too much play, and he’d instigated most of it. Crazy days and sweat-slicked nights and the stripping back of his self-control until there’d been barely enough left to walk away.
At a dead run.
He’d been twenty-five at the time, he was thirty-six now and he doubted he’d fare any better with Angie now than he had all those years ago.
He squinted. Looked at the photo again. Could it be Angie? They were very long odds. He’d never kept in contact with her; had no idea where she was in the world or what she was doing now.
No, he decided for the second time in as many minutes. It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her.
‘She pregnant?’ he texted his brother.
‘Hell, no,’ came Max’s all-caps reply, and Logan grinned and sent through his all-caps congratulations. And then deleted the picture so that he wouldn’t keep staring at it and wondering what Angie—his Angie—would look like now.
Evangeline Jones felt decidedly nervous as Max helped her out of the taxi and followed her up the garden path to his mother’s front door. It was one thing to agree to a marriage of convenience. It was another thing altogether to play the love-smitten fiancée in front of Max’s family.
‘Whose idea was this?’ she muttered to Max as she stared at the elegant two-storey Victorian in front of them. ‘And why did I ever imagine it was a good one?’
‘Relax,’ said Max. ‘Even if my mother doesn’t believe we’re marrying for love, she won’t mention it.’
‘Maybe not to you,’ said Evie, and then the door opened, and an elegantly dressed woman opened her arms and Max stepped into them.
Max’s mother was everything a wealthy Toorak widow should be. Coiffed to perfection, her grey-blonde hair was swept up in an elegant roll and her make-up made her look ten years younger than she was. Her perfume was subtle, her jewellery exquisite. Her hands were warm and dry and her kisses were airy as she greeted Evie and then retreated a step to study her like a specimen under glass.
‘Welcome to the family, Evangeline,’ said Caroline, and there was no censure in that controlled and cultured voice. ‘Max has spoken of you often over the years, though I don’t believe we’ve ever met.’
‘Different cities,’ said Evie awkwardly. ‘Please, call me Evie. Max has mentioned you too.’
‘All good, I hope.’
‘Always,’ said Evie and Max together.
Points for harmony.
In truth, in the six years she’d known him, Max had barely mentioned his mother other than to say she’d never been the maternal type and that she set exceptionally high standards for everything; be it a manicure or the behaviour of her husbands or her sons.
‘No engagement ring?’ queried Caroline with the lift of an elegant eyebrow.
‘Ah, no,’ said Evie. ‘Not yet. There was so much choice I, ah … couldn’t decide.’
‘Indeed,’ said Caroline, before turning to Max. ‘I can, of course, make an appointment for you with my jeweller this afternoon. I’m sure he’ll have something more than suitable. That way Evie will have a ring on her finger when she attends the cocktail party I’m hosting for the pair of you tonight.’
‘You didn’t have to fuss,’ said Max as he set their overnight cases just inside the door beside a wide staircase.
‘Introducing my soon-to-be daughter-in-law to family and friends is not fuss,’ said Max’s mother reprovingly. ‘It’s expected, and so is a ring. Your brother’s here, by the way.’
‘You summoned him home as well?’
‘He came of his own accord,’ she said dryly. ‘No one makes your brother do anything.’
‘He’s my role model,’ whispered Max as they followed the doyenne of the house down the hall.
‘I need a cocktail dress,’ Evie whispered back.
‘Get it when I go ring hunting. What kind of stone do you want?’
‘Diamond.’
‘Colour?’
